Google News - still in Beta

Ever wondered why Google News, three years after its sensational launch, is still in its Beta Mode? Wired News has this explanation

So while other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.
The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.

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Gmail Chat Disabled

The fact that it happened does not surprise me but that it took so long for our network administrators to figure it out does. And if you are wondering how do you disable Gmail's chat features on your network, you only need locking DNS lookups to chatenabled.mail.google.com , by returning 127.0.0.1 .

Advertising Billboards as Rain Covers

Advertising billboards are put to use as Pakistani refugees, left homeless after the October 8 earthquake, set up their tents in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. [via SFGate ] Technorati Tags: Pakistan Earthquake

Community effort to create a single persistence model for the Java community

A community effort led by Sun Microsystems is aiming to create a single 'Plain Old Java Object' persistence model to provide a single object/relational mapping facility for Java app developers in J2SE and J2EE. Paul Krill writes In a letter to the “Java Technology Community” on Friday, specification leads on Java Specification Request (JSR) 220, which is the proposal for Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, and JSR-243, for Java Data Objects, state that the two technologies feature divergent persistence models. “This divergence has caused confusion and debates among Java developers, and is not in the best of interest of the Java community,” said JSR-220 leader Linda DeMichiel who also is a Sun employee, and Craig Russell, a staff engineer at Sun who leads JSR-243. “In response to these requests [for an end to the unwanted divide], Sun Microsystems is leading a community effort to create a single POJO (Plain Old Java Object) persistence model for the Java community,” the letter said.

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